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12.
“The big opportunity with open licenses is far more practical:
it has the potential to dramatically increase the impact, reach
and scale of the ideas we invest in…”
The Shuttleworth Foundation, 2008

18.
In brief…
Addressing primary school curriculum subjects
Facilitating production of high quality new
content on Wikipedia
Accessing existing articles linked to primary
education
Specific focus on Africa
URL: http://bit.ly/WikipediaPS
Wikipedia Primary
School SSAJRP
Programme
Providing the information necessary to
the cycle of Primary Education in the
languages used by the different
education systems

19.
Wikipedia Primary School
SSAJRP Programme
Research team
Switzerland
Iolanda Pensa (principal investigator)
Luca Botturi
Florence Devouard
Giancarlo Gianocca
Erica Litrenta
Giovanni Profeta
Marta Pucciarelli
South Africa
Tobias Schönwetter (principal investigator)
Isla Haddow-Flood
Kelsey Wiens
The research is developed
within a Swiss-South
African cooperation lead
by the University of Applied
Sciences and Arts of
Southern Switzerland
(SUPSI) and the University
of Cape Town, in
partnership with Wikimedia
Switzerland and the Africa
Centre based in Cape
Town, and with the support
of SNF and the South
African National Research
Foundation (NRF).

20.
Methodology
● Establishment of a scientific committee.
● Establishment and implementation of a Wikipedia
Scientific Journal.
● Partnerships with scientific journals and scholars.
● Partnerships with institutions working in education.
● Evaluation.

21.
Milestones
1. Analysis of the South African primary school curriculum and identification of relevant themes and content
2. Identification, selection and involvement of a scientific committee comprised of international subject-matter
experts (education, open content, OER, Wikipedia and Wikimedia, expertise on African topics) to assist with
content-related questions
3. Identification of Wikipedia articles in English that are relevant to the South African primary school curriculum with
feedback from the scientific committee
4. Development of guidelines for the review process
5. Development of a survey to involve teachers in the process
6. Drafting of Issue 0 (“pilot issue”) of the Wikipedia Scientific Journal
7. Identification of academic experts and pertinent scientific journals to contribute to the review process of the
Wikipedia articles selected
8. Launch of the review process. Selection of articles and invitation of potential reviewers to review articles. 25
experts are currently involved in the review of 37 articles
9. Pilot launch of the journal review process. Selection of articles, identification of potential journals, and invitation to
review articles
10.Development and testing of approaches to trigger article creation and improvement directly on Wikipedia
11.Selection of criteria and data collection for the evaluation (information design)
12.Organization of three events (edit-a-thons) in South Africa to improve articles related to primary school curriculum.
17 articles have been edited and expanded
13.Meetings in South Africa (Cape Town and Johannesburg) to discuss project methodology and expected outcomes
with around 15 stakeholders working in the education sector as well as 30 Wikimedia community members.

22.
Incoming and
outgoing links
The visualization shows the
balance between incoming links
(in Wikipedia: “What links here”)
and links to other Wikipedia
pages (Wikilinks).
On the top the bars show the
amount of incoming links. On the
bottom the bars show the amount
of outgoing links. From left to
right, articles are in ascending
order of incoming links.

23.
Articles’ features
The visualization shows the
amount of issues, references,
notes, images and see also for
every article.
On the top the bars show the
number of issues. On the
bottom the bars show the
amount of references, notes,
images and see also. From left
to right, articles are in
ascending order of features.

26.
Showcase of some of the methodologies tested
Type Description Number
of
articles
Outcome
Review by expert Review or rewriting by an expert. 31 10 articles significantly improved.
Local edit-a-thons
with new participants
Edit-a-thons organized in South Africa,
and attended mostly by new editors. Local
topics.
16 Modest outcome (few edits, limited
improvement. Articles modified may
not be those targeted)
Local edit-a-thon
with experimented
editors
Organized in South Africa on local topic. 2 Significant improvements to both
articles
Call for edits during
other parties edit-a-
thons
Organized in other countries. Generally
with experimented editors. Targeted
topics.
9 No results
Articles for creation Non existent articles were proposed for
creation in dedicated space
7 2 articles were created
Featured on portal
page
Well developed articles were featured
more visibly on South Africa portal page
4 Increased visits on one article, but
no improvement
Online thematic
challenges
Articles were listed as “core articles” to
improve during an online challenge
7 5 very significantly improved.

27.
Publishing of an expert review in the talk page of the Wikipedia article

28.
Featuring biographies or quotes on the South Africa portal page on Wikipedia

29.
Surfing on the opportunity of joining a “barnraising” event on Wikipedia

30.
Lessons
Expert rewriting was of high quality and generally very well received by the community
! Examples : Flag of South Africa, Mapungubwe Museum, Saartjie Baartman
The quality and usefulness of expert reviews differed widely
! from very short report strictly following the template proposed (with limited impact)
! to very detailed reviews (often with high impact, eg: Herero and Namaqua genocide)
Very generic articles were the hardest to get improved (eg, paper or bicycle)
Edit-a-thons with new editors may feature training and hope to recruit new editors, but should
not be expected to result in actual article improvements
Attention and interest from regular wikipedians is hard to get unless presented as a common
meaningful challenge
Activity on dedicated WikiProjects and thematic portal pages is largely overrated.

34.
Data visualisation
The visual evaluation is conceived as
an iterative process. All the data
visualizations are designed and
optimized thanks to the feedback of
team members involved in the
qualitative evaluation.
Giovanni has developed a web scraper
to gather
data about Wikipedia articles and a set
of data visualizations, as objective as
possible, in order to provide visual
tools for understanding the actions
that should be undertaken by the
research team.
Giovanni has also released in open
source the datasets and the code for
web scraping and data visualization
(as a GitHub project called Wikimole).